President Bush's military surge working...for now

December 26, 2007

No one can debate now that violence in Iraq has declined. An accounting for the month of November found that just more than 700 Iraqis were killed, compared to 2,155 last May before President Bush's troop escalation began in earnest. Even with several spectacular bombings so far this month, fatalities are still significantly lower than a year ago. Bush's so-called surge strategy has paid off. And now that the president has finished patting himself on the back, he needs to pick up the phone and call former Gen. Eric Shinseki to apologize. Shinseki, of course, was the Army chief of staff just before the war. In February 2003, he told Congress that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed in keep control in Iraq. After all, he explained, "we're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems." If only the White House had listened. In one sense, should anyone be surprised that the troop escalation has brought results? Baghdad and New York City are about the same size; each has just over 8 million residents. If the federal government gave New York City 30,000 additional police officers, wouldn't crime in the city plummet? Maybe, said William Heffernan, a professor of criminology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "You could get some kind of reduction," he said, "but not for the reasons you might think." Comparisons between crime in New York and the conflict in Iraq are imperfect at best. But one of Heffernan's observations about criminals turns out to be quite revealing when applied to Iraq. "If you flood the zone with police in, say, Washington Heights, yes, there will be less drug dealing, but that's because the drug dealers will simply lay low," he said. "This has happened. They try to outlast you." In Iraq, Moktada al-Sadr, who controls the anti-American Mahdi Army, is essentially "lying low." He declared a six-month cease fire - four months ago. But even more scary are the roughly 70,000 Sunni tribal militiamen trained and paid by the United States to fight al-Qaida. No one doubts that they are lying low. Sure, they are happy to shoot at foreign al-Qaida fighters - for now. But many of them, speaking to numerous newspaper and magazine reporters, have openly declared their larger aim: to retake Baghdad and restore Sunni control of Iraq once the Americans leave. The Shiite government is stacking the police with loyalists and starving the Sunni militiamen. Meanwhile, the Sunnis are hatching plans to overtake Baghdad once the Americans leave. The first withdrawal is already under way - 5,000 American soldiers working in Diyala province are leaving this month and will not be replaced. Under Bush's plan, all 30,000 "surge" troops will be withdrawn by next summer. Looking at Iraq as a law-enforcement dilemma, Heffernan sees what he calls a "much greater time discount." "The mullahs are playing for the long term - not like drug dealers," he said. "The mullahs can wait us out. That is why I am so much more pessimistic about the surge than I am about policing in New York." Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Leonard Pitts is on vacation. Joel Brinkley